The Vision and Philosophy Behind Scribo

Remember when the internet wasn’t so awful? I’m talking about pre-Google days, before Facebook, and even before MySpace. Back when the closest thing you had to social media was Yahoo Groups. Now that the billionaires have gobbled up most of the internet and tucked it behind a paywall, or worse, kept their services free to use only to harvest every detail about you and sell your private information to data brokers and advertisers. Listen, for a couple of cents, I can learn more information about you than you know about yourself. It isn’t good. Anyways, I miss the far less capitalist internet. Scribo aims to be a throwback to the days when the users came first.

Since we don’t have shareholders to satisfy or advertisers to impress, engagement metrics don’t matter to us. That means we won’t encourage fighting and arguments with algorithms that push controversial content for the sake of profits. We believe in people before profits.

Part of our people before profits approach means we want to see you, the user, profit from our site before we do. Make a Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi account and add your support link. That link will show up on your profile, as well as below every post that you make. Want to use affiliate links in your posts? Do it, we won’t stop you or punish you the way other sites do. Make money, promote your work, and do what you love.

Will we always be ad-free? Unlikely. Running a website like this isn’t expensive, but it isn’t exactly cheap. The website will eventually, at a minimum, need to find a way to pay for itself. I’m just one guy after all, and while I’m ok paying out of pocket to get things up and running, I can’t afford to fund the site indefinitely, especially if it sees any real degree of success. More users mean more costs. If you’d like to help us remain as independent as possible, check out our support page to see how you can help.